Scout Moves

I’ve been 50 years old for a full week now, so I’ll ask the question people seem to ask on this occasion—how does it feel to be 50? Well, I’ll tell ya, it feels about like what it felt to be 49. This week, my back has hurt the way it sometimes did at my younger ages, so when I make old-woman noises while in the process of sitting down and standing back up—and lord help us all if I sneeze—that’s nothing new. I have been flitting from project to project this week doing what I call “work” because I don’t have a real job, but I’ve been doing that for years. I haven’t had a 9-to-5 job for some time now—I’ll confess it was always more like 8-to-3 anyway. And now I spend time typesetting ebooks a little here, designing a logo there, fitting in a brochure for a bed and breakfast a friend has opened on one day and a bookcover for a non-profit publisher on another. This week, “work” has been more about the orchestra, which is my preference. On Monday, I hauled Conductor Eric around the cou...

So, this is what 50 feels like—stiff muscles, sore throat, general feeling of unsettlement (a new word, maybe?). I woke up yesterday morning feeling exhausted because I had hardly slept the night before, unable to turn off my stimulated brain. And as the day wore on, I felt worse so that by bedtime, I was sure I had the flu. Even my skin hurt, which is the insufficient phrase I use to describe that feeling you get when you do actually have the flu, and every inch of you feels just wrong. This morning, the “unsettlement” feeling continues, but I have a full day ahead of being lazy. Working backwards… My 50th birthday was this past Thursday, and I spent the day cleaning my house, for the most part. I mopped everything I could reach with the mop and dusted and tidied up, which is why my back muscles are scowling the scowl of abuse. I talked to a few dear friends, and I waited in anticipation of the party to be held the next day. On Friday, I herded the animals into the car and dropp...

It’s my birthday week! OK, I’m not so self-absorbed that I think I deserve a whole week to acknowledge my birthday, but I do love when my birthday rolls around. Just ask my local friends—I usually text them in the morning and say “happy birthday to me!” On Thursday, I’ll turn 50. That’s half a century. That’s five full decades. That’s 30 years shy of the end based on life expectancy in the US—80.6 for women—or lights out based on life expectancy in Cameroon. I’d like to say that 50 is just a number, but honestly I’m wallowing in the digits. Here I am at what’s supposed to be some kind of milestone or an apex with downhill the only direction left to go, but I think I’m still climbing. Life expectancy be damned. Middle age my ass. At 50, I’m working on a major weight adjustment (aiming for less of it), consequently buying new clothes a little at a time, reading books I’ve never read before, stretching my creative muscle with new projects, looking forward to decades more of discover...

My father died nearly 12 years ago. It was a long process because Alzheimer’s disease took him away in bits and pieces over a period of years, and I would pay annual visits to find him less and less of the man I knew when he and I were both younger. But there was a day that made his imminent death a certainty in my mind, the day his doctor told my mother and sister the rest of us should say our good-byes very soon. I stood in the kitchen washing dishes and cried more in one go than I believe I ever had before. We had planned a quick camping trip that weekend, and Husband didn’t want to cancel it, so we went anyway—I would travel south to see my father a final time the following week. After the girls had gone to bed in the motorhome, Husband and I sat out by the fire, and I listed all the things my father had ever said and done to me that made me feel cold to him. I won’t list them here because they aren’t on the surface anymore, but that night, as I thought of his dying, all I could...

My hair goes wild when I go swimming. My daughter tells me. Mom, she says, your hair is pretty, and she means it isn’t. My hair goes wild when I go swimming. If you swim with me, pretend you don't see. At summer camp, mixed swimming was forbidden. Boys and girls in the water boil up a summer soup of trouble. Boys and girls might think things under water's murky cover. Might see shapes dripping with sunlight as they step onto shore. Might go wild. Might pretend they didn’t. Then who would know if they were bad, the boys and girls? My hair goes wild when I go swimming. If you swim with me, pretend you don't see. Tell me it’s pretty, and I'll pretend that's true.

Every morning, I wake up and follow a sleepy routine. Unless Husband has beat me to it, I let the dog out, turn on the coffee maker, feed the dog, make my regular breakfast—one egg with two pieces turkey sausage—and ease into my chair to watch some banter on CNN and check email. And then I select 90 percent of the emails for deletion without reading them. They’re mostly marketing messages from Williams Sonoma, Eddie Bauer and Tea Forte anyway. But there is one daily email I never delete without reading, and one of my morning sources of delight is to have breakfast as I read it— Today in Literature . I learn something new every single day, just a fact sometimes, something that may not matter apart from Trivial Pursuit, but it all adds up to learning regardless. Today, I learned that on this date in 1942, Anne Frank wrote the first entry of her diary, for example. “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone….,” she wrote. And I ...

This weekend brought the end of the Philharmonic season, and what a season it was. It seemed that with each concert, we performed better and were received by the audience better than the concert before. And beyond programming, we branched out with new promotional initiatives that put our name in the public square more than it has been in recent years. This past Saturday, we capped it all off with a country concert. What does an orchestra peopled with classically trained musicians know about country music? Not much, maybe, but we put together a program that blended Nashville and Americana and John Williams and did it justice. Four Nashville performers joined us, so that we would play a song or two, and they would perform a brief set, then we would play, and they would return to the stage and so on. On occasion, we were all playing together, with a local country band seated between the strings and the wind section as if they belonged there. Very fun. I heard mandolin and steel guitar...

The babies when they needed me as Mother full-time. The last few weeks have been all about being a mother to my girls. Parenting was a full-time job years ago when they were under my roof year round, but then it became less central to my identity and responsibilities. For the moment, we’ve returned to our old ways, and it feels good. Katie arrived here Saturday night after an 11-day trek across the country , and I went to sleep that evening with the comfort of knowing my babies were in their beds—for the moment, right where they belonged. In early May, I moved Emily out of her dorm, hauling a year’s worth of stuff down a flight of stairs and packing my car in masterful ways, to the ceiling and leaving just enough room for the driver. Then I flew to Berkeley and helped Katie pack up and clean her condo, filling her car as well, and watching the movers haul out her belongings for storage. Then I returned home to help Emily get ready for her main summer activity, working at Husban...

The Summer of Love. The Boys of Summer. Summer Lovin’. Dog Days of Summer. Summer inspires phrases and titles and delightful quotes like this one from Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters —“I'd like to know if I could compare you to a summer's day. Because -- well, June 12th was quite nice.” This year, summer is inspiring all sorts of things in Scout-land. I’ll be turning 50 three weeks from yesterday, which I never thought would bother me, but as the date approaches, I’m starting to wonder. I received an invitation to join AARP the other day, and I’m telling you I almost cried. But more than reaching a made-up milestone in terms of years on the planet, I seem to be making transitions. I’m on the verge of giving up my newspaper column, which I have been taking a break from anyway. I had actually decided to let it go completely until some friends suggested I wait until the end of summer to decide. So, it’s still up in the air. I have been a columnist for three years and partia...